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Urban Geopolitics

In the last decade a new wave of urban research has emerged,

putting comparative perspectives back on the urban studies agenda.
However, this research is frequently based on similar case studies on
a few selected cities in America and Europe and all too often focus
on the abstract city level with marginal attention given to particular
local contexts.
Moving away from loosely defined urban theories and contexts,
this book argues it is time to start learning from and compare across
different ‘contested cities’. It questions the long-standing Euro-
centric academic knowledge production that is prevalent in urban
studies and planning research. This book brings together a diverse
range of international case studies from Latin America, South and
South East Asia, Eastern Europe, Africa and the Middle East to offer
an in-depth understanding of the worldwide contested nature of
cities in a wide range of local contexts. It suggests an urban
ontology that moves beyond the urban ‘West’ and ‘North’ as well as
adding a comparative-relational understanding of the contested
nature that ‘Southern’ cities are developing.
This timely contribution is essential reading for those working in
the fields of human geography, urban studies, planning, politics,
area studies and sociology.

Jonathan Rokem, PhD, is Marie Skłodowska-Curie Research Fellow

at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London
(UCL), UK. His research interests and publications focus on spatial
and social critical analysis of cities and regions.

Camillo Boano, PhD, is Senior Lecturer at the Bartlett Development

Planning Unit and Director of the MSc in Building and Urban Design
in Development, UCL, UK. He is author of The Ethics of a Potential
Urbanism: Critical Encounters Between Giorgio Agamben and
Architecture (2017).
Routledge Studies in Urbanism and the City

This series offers a forum for original and innovative research that
engages with key debates and concepts in the field. Titles within the
series range from empirical investigations to theoretical
engagements, offering international perspectives and
multidisciplinary dialogues across the social sciences and humanities,
from urban studies, planning, geography, geohumanities, sociology,
politics, the arts, cultural studies, philosophy and literature.
For a full list of titles in this series, please visit
www.routledge.com/series/RSUC
The Urban Political Economy and Ecology of Automobility
Driving Cities, Driving Inequality, Driving Politics
Edited by Alan Walks
Cities and Inequalities in a Global and Neoliberal World
Edited by Faranak Miraftab, David Wilson and Ken E. Salo
Beyond the Networked City
Infrastructure Reconfigurations and Urban Change in the North and
South
Edited by Olivier Coutard and Jonathan Rutherford
Technologies for Sustainable Urban Design and
Bioregionalist Regeneration
Dora Francese
Markets, Places, Cities
Kirsten Seale
Shrinking Cities
Understanding Urban Decline in the United States
Russell C. Weaver, Sharmistha Bagchi-Sen, Jason C. Knight and Amy
E. Frazier
Mega-Urbanization in the Global South
Fast Cities and New Urban Utopias of the Postcolonial State
Edited by Ayona Datta and Abdul Shaban
Green Belts
Past; Present; Future?
John Sturzaker and Ian Mell
Spiritualizing the City
Agency and Resilience of the Urban and Urbanesque Habitat
Edited by Victoria Hegner and Peter Jan Margry
The Latino City
Urban Planning, Politics, and the Grassroots
Erualdo R. Gonzalez
Rebel Streets and the Informal Economy
Street Trade and the Law
Edited by Alison Brown
Mega-events and Urban Image Construction
Beijing and Rio de Janeiro
Anne-Marie Broudehoux
Urban Geopolitics
Rethinking Planning in Contested Cities
Edited by Jonathan Rokem and Camillo Boano
Urban Geopolitics
Rethinking Planning in Contested Cities

Edited by Jonathan Rokem and

Camillo Boano
First published 2018
by Routledge
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and by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa
business
© 2018 selection and editorial matter, Jonathan Rokem and Camillo
Boano; individual chapters, the contributors
The right of Jonathan Rokem and Camillo Boano to be identified as
the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their
individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections
77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical,
or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including
photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or
retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks
or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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ISBN: 978-1-138-96266-8 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-315-65927-8 (ebk)
Typeset in Times New Roman
by Cenveo Publisher Services
Contents

List of illustrations
Notes on contributors
Acknowledgements
Foreword
SARA FREGONESE

Introduction: towards contested urban geopolitics on a

global scale
JONATHAN ROKEM AND CAMILLO BOANO

PART I
Comparative urban geopolitics
Part introduction
JONATHAN ROKEM

1 Post-war reconstruction in contested cities: comparing

urban outcomes in Sarajevo and Beirut
GRUIA BĂDESCU

2 Negotiating cities: Nairobi and Cape Town

LIZA ROSE CIROLIA

3 Ordinary urban geopolitics: contrasting Jerusalem and

Stockholm
JONATHAN ROKEM
PART II
Urban geopolitics: South and South East Asia
Part introduction
CAMILLO BOANO

4 The tale of ethno-political and spatial claims in a

contested city: the Muhajir community in Karachi
SADAF SULTAN KHAN, KAYVAN KARIMI AND LAURA VAUGHAN

5 The practice of ‘marketplace coordination’ in Jakarta

(1977–98)
PAWDA F. TJOA

6 The politics of doing nothing: a rethinking of the culture

of poverty in Khulna c. 1882–1990
APURBA KUMAR PODDER

PART III
Urban geopolitics: Middle East and North Africa
Part introduction
JONATHAN ROKEM

7 The camp vs the campus: the geopolitics of urban

thresholds in Famagusta, Northern Cyprus
MORIEL RAM

8 Urban planning, religious voices and ethnicity in the

contested city of Acre: the Lababidi mosque explored
NIMROD LUZ AND NURIT STADLER

9 Exploring the roots of contested public spaces of Cairo:

theorizing structural shifts and increased complexity
MOHAMED SALEH

PART IV
Urban geopolitics: Latin America
 Part introduction
CAMILLO BOANO

10 Unpacking narratives of social conflict and inclusion:

anti-gentrification neighbourhood organization in
Santiago, Chile
CAMILA COCIÑA AND ERNESTO LÓPEZ-MORALES

11 The Medellín’s shifting geopolitics of informality: the

Encircled Garden as a dispositive of civil
disenfranchisement?
CATALINA ORTIZ AND CAMILLO BOANO

12 Assessing critical urban geopolitics in Foz do Iguaçu,

Brazil
PETER D. A. WOOD

PART V
Comparative discussion
Part introduction
JONATHAN ROKEM

13 Geopolitics, cosmopolitanism and planning: contested

cities in a global context
MICHAEL SAFIER WITH JONATHAN ROKEM AND CAMILLO BOANO

Afterword: lineages of urban geopolitics

JAMES D. SIDAWAY

Index
Illustrations

Figures

0.1 Positioning the 15 case study cities

1.1 Religious buildings for four different faiths lie close to each
other in downtown Sarajevo
1.2 Sarajevo
1.3 Beirut
2.1 Tatu City
2.2 A tenement development in Nairobi
2.3 Incremental extensions to RDP dwellings
3.1 Jerusalem’s borders and boundaries
3.2 Stockholm’s borders and boundaries
4.1 District-wise distribution of (a) Urdu as a mother tongue, (b)
election results 2008, (c) MQM unit offices, (d) Imambargahs
and (e) Barelvi mosques
4.2 Location of the Muhajir majority areas, Muhajir centres,
signal-free corridors and flyover and underpass projects
4.3 Streets commercialised in 2003, overlaid on Muhajir clusters
R1,000m, showing that these areas fall primarily into
Muhajir/MQM jurisdiction
5.1 Mercu Suar projects Protocol Avenue and ‘economy roads’
5.2 Unruly petty traders blocking traffic
5.3 Plan of Pasar Mayestik Blok 1
6.1 Relocated Kacha-bazaar in Tarer-pukur
6.2 (Disappearing) public land inside the city in 2002
6.3 Tarer-pukur Kacha-bazaar, 1982–90
 7.1 The threshold of abandonment between Varosha and
Famagusta
8.1 Lababidi mosque
9.1 The heavy green and gold fences
10.1 Landscape of high-rise renewal in Santiago
10.2 Location of cases in Santiago
10.3 Leaflet calling for support to one IRA’s house
10.4 Construction site of Factoría Italia in 2014
11.1 Medellín hilly landscape towards Comuna
11.2 Medellín Comuna 8 local community mobilization
12.1 Foz do Iguaçu metropolitan area

Tables

4.1 Synthesis of Karachi’s political and urban development

histories
12.1 Factor summaries by issue
Contributors

Apurba Kumar Podder has recently completed his PhD from the
University of Cambridge. He examines how illegality as a condition
informs and shapes the internal dynamics of informal growth in
developing cities.
Camila Cociiia is a Teaching Fellow and PhD candidate at the
Bartlett Development Planning Unit, UCL. Her current research
focuses on housing policies and urban inequalities in the Chilean
context.
Camillo Boano, PhD, is Senior Lecturer at the Bartlett Development
Planning Unit, UCL, and Director of the MSc in Building and Urban
Design in Devel-opment. He is author of The Ethics of a Potential
Urbanism: Critical Encounters Between Giorgio Agamben and
Architecture (2017).
Catalina Ortiz, PhD, is Lecturer at the Bartlett Development
Planning Unit, UCL. She is researching critical spatial practices
intersecting urban design, land management, large-scale projects,
strategic spatial planning and urban policy mobility in the Global
South.
Ernesto López-Morales is Associate Professor in the University of
Chile and Associate Researcher at the Centre for Social Conflict
and Cohesion Studies (COES), where he focuses on land
economic, gentrification, neoliberal urbanism and housing in Chile
and Latin American cities.
Gruia Bădescu is a Lecturer in Human Geography at Christ Church,
University of Oxford. His research interests include post-war
 reconstruction and coming to terms with the past.
James D. Sidaway is based at the National University of
Singapore, where he is Professor of political geography. His
research currently focuses on security and insecurity and the
history and philosophy of geography.
Jonathan Rokem, PhD, is Marie Skłodowska-Curie Research Fellow
at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. His research interests
and publications focus on spatial and social critical analysis of
cities and regions.
Kayvan Karimi is a Senior Lecturer within UCL’s Space Syntax
Laboratory and Director of Space Syntax Limited, a UCL
knowledge transfer spin-off. His main areas of research include
evidence-based design and planning, organic and informal
urbanism and large-scale urban systems.
Laura Vaughan is Professor of Urban Form and Society and
Director of UCL’s Space Syntax Laboratory. Laura’s research
addresses the inherent complexity of the urban environment both
theoretically and methodologically. Her most recent book,
Suburban Urbanities, was published by UCL Press in 2015.
Liza Rose Cirolia is a Researcher at the African Centre for Cities,
University of Cape Town. Her research focuses on housing,
infrastructure and land in African cities. Her current PhD research
is focused on public finance in African cities.
Michael Safier is Professor Emeritus at the Development Planning
Unit, UCL. He dedicated his life, research and teaching activities,
and professional practice to urban planning development,
specifically around the conceptualization of cosmopolitan
planning.
Moriel Ram, PhD, is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Advanced
Studies at UCL. His research interests are militarized geographies
and urban geopolitics of faith in the Middle East and the
Mediterranean.
Nimrod Luz is Associate Professor at the Sociology and
Anthropology Depart-ment, Western Galilee College. His research
interests include geography of religion with particular interest in
minorities’ sacred sites, changing cultural landscape of the Middle
East and religiosity in the mixed town of Acre.
Nurit Stadler is Associate Professor at the Sociology and
Anthropology Depart-ment, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Her research interests include Israel’s Ultraorthodox community,
fundamentalism, Greek Orthodox and Catholic rituals in
Jerusalem.
Pawda F. Tjoa is a researcher at Publica, a London-based public
realm consultancy. She recently completed her PhD at the
University of Cambridge, during which she explored the
connection between public space and political ideology in post-
independence Jakarta.
Peter D. A. Wood is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Demography at the
Federal University of Minas Gerais in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. His
work focuses on migration, violence and political participation in
Global South development projects.
Sadaf Sultan Khan has recently completed her PhD at the Space
Syntax Laboratory, UCL. Her work focuses on the appropriation,
adaptation and contestation of urban space by migrant
communities.
Sara Fregonese is based at the University of Birmingham, where
she is Research Fellow in urban resilience. Her research currently
focuses on the urban geopolitics of civil war and terrorism and on
historical-political geographies of sectarianism in the Levant.
Acknowledgements

This volume has been a collective effort, which was initiated from a
double session Rethinking Urban Geopolitics in Ordinary and
Contested Cities convened by the editors at the Royal Geographic
Society (RGS) Annual Conference in London 2014.
We first and primarily want to thank our families for their limitless
support and patience throughout the process of working on this
book and in all our research endeavours. For Jonathan Rokem:
Michal, Ben and Adam, and for Camillo Boano: Elena, Beatrice and
Francesca.
We would like to thank several colleagues who have supported us
throughout our work on this book manuscript, not necessarily in any
specific order. We would like to thank: Julio Dávila Silva, Laura
Vaughan, Caren Levy, Jennifer Robinson, Michael Safier, Matthew
Gandy, James D. Sidaway, Haim Yacobi and Sara Fregonese, among
several other colleagues, for their fruitful conversations and
discussions at different stages of the work on this book. Thanks goes
to Fok Chung Wing and Sadaf Sultan Khan for assistance with the
graphics and maps. We also want to extend our thanks (especially
Jonathan Rokem) to all colleagues in the Space Syntax Laboratory,
Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, and the European Commission
Horizon 2020 Marie Curie Research Fellowship Grant No. 658742 for
funding this project; and (especially Camillo Boano) to all colleagues
in the Bartlett Development Planning Unit, UCL.
We also want to thank all the authors for their contributions,
commitment and patience during the drafting process; without them
this collective volume would not have come to life. Finally, we want
to thank our editors at Routledge, Faye Leerink and Priscilla Corbett,
for all their support during the production process.
Foreword
Sara Fregonese

[E]ach man bears in his mind a city made only of differences, a city without
figures and without form, and the individual cities fill it up.

Calvino, 1978: 34

The heterogeneous corpus of literature known as urban geopolitics

has, unsurprisingly for such an interdisciplinary endeavour,
encountered extended critique. At least three critical strands are
particularly relevant to this book in terms of how editors and
contributors respond to and surpass them – advancing but also
regenerating the now more than decennial agenda of urban
geopolitics.
The first critiques came mainly from established political
geography scholarship (Flint, 2006; Smith, 2006). These question
the risk of normalizing cities as necessary loci of war, by simply
shifting – and normalizing – the scale at which geopolitics happens
from the national to the urban, rather than promoting a deeper
understanding of urban conflict. This has not been lost on the
advocates of urban geopolitics, who have warned against the peril of
crystallizing knowledge about city warfare (and the violence suffered
by civilians in cities) into ‘a technoscientific discipline with its own
conference series, research centres, and journals’ (Graham, 2005:
1).
 The second critique queries urban geopolitics’ reliance on a
handful of case studies (usually in Israel/Palestine) where militarism
and warfare constitute the prism through which the urban is made
sense of. Meanwhile, spaces and practices that are not a derivation
of militarized conflict remain under-studied (Adey, 2013; Fregonese,
2012; Harris, 2014). This is ironic because the first mention of urban
geopolitics is in Francophone scholarship within the context of power
struggles in Quebec’s cities (Hulbert, 1989), far from the extreme
case studies that came to dominate the sub-discipline.
The third critique tackles a disembodied and techno-centric
approach to urban violence: urban geopolitics tells us all there is to
know about how cities can be (re)geared for war and targeted, but
also hollows out these spaces of lived experiences and feeling bodies
(Harker, 2014). There currently seems to be an overload of
information about dramatic events of urban violence. As I write,
numerous ‘final messages’ are being posted in real time on social
media by the last residents of East Aleppo as the Syrian Army and
affiliated militias move closer in December 2016. Despite this
increased flux of dramatic information from cities at war, we
somehow know still too little about the everyday, domestic and lived
experiences and sensitivities of urban residents coping amid war,
division, emergency and crisis.
This regeneration project takes stock of these critiques and tackles
them not only conceptually, by bringing the everyday, the ordinary
and the affective into the debate, but also by situating them within a
contemporary context of global challenges, including protracted
urbanized warfare and the resulting unprecedented refugee and
humanitarian crises that are becoming predominantly urban.
First, this book decrystallizes urban geopolitical knowledge: it
unites heterogeneous case studies and theoretical approaches under
the same umbrella approach, but constantly keeps us on our toes,
by seeking out the dense connections between power, space and
planning at multiple scales, beyond the territorial categories of
national/sub-national, foreign/domestic, state/non-state,
formal/informal. The city, according to Charles Tilly, offers a ‘toolbox’
for researchers to link macro- and micro-scale dynamics. It is the
continuous dialogue between the macro and the micro that this book
mobilizes so well. One of the tenets of urban geopolitics has been
tracing connections between macro-scale global politics and
phenomena of localized violence (Graham, 2004), but this multi-
scalar dialogue somehow has often faded among techno-centric
analyses of mainstream urban geopolitics.
Second, the many cities, spanning four continents, in this book
expand the case study range of urban geopolitics not only
territorially, but also methodologically – pausing the exercise of
finding similarities, and opening the ground to contrapuntal analysis
and learning through distinctive differences. Taking urban geopolitics
on a more intellectually refined and methodologically ambitious level,
this book explores multiscale connections, along a wide range of
locations, looking at the everyday and ordinary beyond the
militaristic, and filling the city fabric with bodies, communities,
resistances and quotidian practices.
Finally, the cities that this book takes its readers to are not only
and not merely ‘strategic urban networks’ gaining some sort of
geopolitical significance from their strength as financial and
investment hubs (Sassen, in Knight Frank Research, 2012). Neither
are they autonomous and bounded entities analysed solely through
a specific range of technologies (Graham, 2016). Here, instead, are
cities full of noises and bodies, their analysis resulting from in-depth
ethnography, where the ordinary, not just the military, becomes
geopolitical: ‘relational sites’ (Rokem and Boano, Introduction, this
volume) where micro- and macro- discourses and practices are
continuously reworked and contested.
Readers should not expect to contemplate these cities comfortably
from afar, nor be dropped into them vertically from above. These
cities ‘made of differences’ offer, instead, multiple access points from
which to explore the ever-expanding range of conflicts, contestations
and cultural formations shaping our global urban future.

References
Adey, P. (2013) Securing the volume/volumen: comments on Stuart Elden’s
plenary paper ‘Secure the volume’. Political Geography, 34: 52–4.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2013.01.003.
Calvino, I. (1978) Invisible Cities, 1st Harvest/HBJ edn. New York: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich.
Flint, C. (2006) Cities, war, and terrorism: towards an urban geopolitics (book
review). Annals of the Association of American Geography, 96(1): 216–18.
Fregonese, S. (2012) Urban geopolitics 8 years on: hybrid sovereignties, the
everyday, and geographies of peace. Geography Compass, 6(5): 290–303.
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-8198.2012.00485.x.
Graham, S. (2004) Postmortem city: towards an urban geopolitics. City, 8(2): 165–
196. https://doi.org/10.1080/1360481042000242148.
Graham, S. (2005) Remember Fallujah: demonising place, constructing atrocity.
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 23(1): 1–10.
https://doi.org/10.1068/d2301ed.
Graham, S. (2016) Vertical: The City from Satellites to Bunkers. London; New
York: Verso.
Harker, C. (2014) The only way is up? Ordinary topologies of Ramallah: ordinary
topologies of Ramallah. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research,
38(1): 318–35. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2427.12094.
Harris, A. (2014) Vertical urbanisms: opening up geographies of the three-
dimensional city. Progress in Human Geography.
https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132514554323.
Hulbert, F. (1989) Essai de géopolitique urbaine et régionale: la comédie urbaine
de Québec. Laval, Quebec: Éditions du Méridien.
Knight Frank Research (2012) The Wealth Report 2012. A Global Perspective on
Prime Property and Wealth.
Smith, N. (2006) Cities, war, and terrorism: towards an urban geopolitics (book
review). International Journal of Urban and Regional Studies, 30(2): 469–70.
Introduction
Towards contested urban geopolitics on a global
scale

Jonathan Rokem and Camillo Boano

The main focus of this collective book project is how different

contested urbanisms function in diverse political contexts and
geographical settings, and what we can learn from unique
characteristics across different spatial social and political scales. This
introduction ties the different chapter contributions together,
conveying some common patterns related to planning and
contestation of urban ideas and form in relation to the main
overarching theme of the book: Urban Geopolitics. One of the
growing fields of research within urban studies and political
geography in the last decades is the spatio-politics of ethnically
contested urban space, especially in relation to the role of planning
in such sites (see, for example: Hepburn, 2004; Bollens, 2012;
Allegra et al., 2012). This interest should not surprise the reader,
since several urbanisms and post-colonial regimes are witnessing
ongoing ethnic conflicts, often violent and long-lasting. However,
most of the literature published in widely influential urban circles
apparently stems solely from cases in North American and European
cities, with limited examples from other parts of the world (Roy,
2009; Sheppard et al., 2013; Peck, 2015). This book aims to fill this
gap, offering a different vision of what has been labelled the Global
South or the developing world or, in other words, what has been
regarded in urban studies and planning literature as a marginal
Urban Geopolitics.
This is one of the first edited volumes covering the cross-
disciplinary emerging theme of urban geopolitics from a post-colonial
comparative perspective. It brings together a selected group of
young and established scholars within the fields of planning,
urbanism, architecture, political geography and urban sociology.
Engaging with a selected group of relatively under-researched
international case studies in urban studies and planning literature, it
spans Latin America, East Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Europe.
The 15 local urban narratives in this volume comprise a wide
range of settings: Sarajevo, Karachi, Jakarta, Khulna, Famagusta,
Beirut, Jeruaslem, Acre, Cairo, Nairobi, Cape Town, Santiago,
Medellín, Foz do Iguaqu and Stockholm. Each city uncovers urban
geopolitics and planning at various trans-disciplinary global
intersections and local scales. It is impossible to understand the
history of urban politics in cities with ethnic diversity that have been
at one time or another under European control without relating to
the colonial foundations of modern urbanism. In this sense, colonial
power relations remain an integral part of the contemporary urban
condition that still resonate spatially and geopolitically in the present
(King, 1990; Jacobs, 1996; Rokem, 2016a). Critically focusing on
what has traditionally been labelled as part of the ‘Global South East’
(Yiftachel, 2006; Watson, 2013), this edited volume’s underling
argument is that on the surface different kinds of contested cities
share and are developing growing similarities stemming from ethnic,
racial and class conflicts revolving around issues of housing,
infrastructure, participation and identity, among others.
Figure 0.1 Positioning the 15 case study cities
Source: Authors, 2016

The different contributions in this book consider a wide range of

cities and engage with a wide range of trans-disciplinary qualitative
and quantitative methods. The chapters share a joint critical reading
of urban geopolitics (Graham, 2004, 2010; Sidaway, 2009;
Fregonese, 2009, 2012) from different urban settings with the aim of
learning through differences, rather than seeking out similarities
(Robinson, 2006, 2011, 2016) as part of a general call to investigate
differences reframing the potential and limits of comparative urban
research (McFarlane and Robinson, 2012).
In the last decade a new wave of urban research has emerged
putting comparison back on the urban studies agenda (Nijman,
2007; Ward, 2008, 2010; Robinson, 2011, 2014; Peck, 2015).
However, most usual forms of comparison conventionally derive from
comparing similar cases (McFarlane and Robinson, 2012) and are
commonly based on a few selected cities in America and Europe
(Roy, 2014), all too often focusing on the abstract city level with
marginal attention given to particular local contexts (Gough, 2012).
Most of this debate has been about the ontological status of the
urban/city, the basis for comparing them and the consequences of
different starting points in doing so (Sidaway et al., 2016: 784–5),
running the risk of producing yet another wave of armchair research
agenda setting lacking substantial empirical enquiry (Nijman, 2015).
With the aim of moving away from such loosely defined urban
theories and contexts the book responds to McFarlane and
Robinson’s (2012: 766) call to place more emphasis on difference in
comparative research. As such, the book questions urban studies’
and planning research’s long-standing Euro-centric academic
knowledge production, methodological regionalism and
incommensurability. To start establishing such a comparative
conversation of what we can learn from different contested cities,
we suggest that there is an increasing need to rethink current
theoretical ‘categories’ and ‘labels’ attributed to cities, based on
empirical research in a wide range of urban areas representing
radically different visions and division patterns. Such a step could
contribute to one of the long-standing questions at the core of urban
theoretical enquiry concerning the validity of singular cases (cities) in
the creation of a general urban theory (Scott and Storper, 2014).
The book’s emphasis on diverse regional settings resonates with
the somewhat overlooked Area Studies discipline, which has
historically (mainly during the European Imperial era and later
during the Cold war years) engaged with similar geographical
repositionings of regional territories. Drawing on Benedict Anderson’s
(2016) arguments on studying intersections or making comparisons,
Sidaway et al. (2016: 785) advocate staging comparisons in terms of
four problematics: difference/similarity, expectancy/surprise,
present/past and familiarity/strangeness. These pairs are neither
reducible solely to methods nor simply academic techniques, but are
a discursive strategy embodying an approach of encounter and
narration. Sidaway et al. (ibid.: 786) propose “there might be
something gained by plunging into new areas, leaving a disciplinary
comfort zone, with familiar literatures, paradigms and people, to
think, present and publish comparatively, venturing into reconfigured
area studies communities or across disciplines, where we are in less
secure territory”.
 Our deliberation is much in line with Sidaway et al.’s (2016)
propositions and is also infused by McFarlane et al.’s (2016) recent
interest in intra-urban comparison (IUC), advocating new
perspectives that reveal the multiple ways in which similarity and
difference need to be reworked both in the context of one city and in
its componentry relationality to other cities – indicating that cities
are not bounded territorial containers but relational sites and
processes. The comparative urbanism project should be focusing
less on the city as a bond formation and more as a multiple space of
many urban worlds (ibid.: 2).
Recognizing this growing interest in the world of comparative
urbanisms, the chapters in this book fuse this with a myriad of
contested relationships between urban space and how it structures
and is structured by social life, understanding the multiplicity of
urbanisms, reinforcing the need to also understand the local political,
economic and social dynamics at play within urban fabrics (Boano,
2016a).
The compositional, messy, uncontrollable and recombinant nature of the
present urbanism, and the differential knowledge at play in the construction
of the urban, is anything but straightforward. A renewed anti essentialist shift
in urban studies and practice is welcome as is ‘shaking up old explanatory
hierarchies and pushing aside stale concepts… making space for a much
richer plurality of voices, in a way that some have likened to a
democratization of urban theory’. In the critical literature, special places have
been reserved for insurgent, rogue, subaltern and alt-urbanisms, as a
premium has been newly attached to the disputation of generalized theory
claims through disruptive or exceptional case studies.

Peck, 2015: 161

The first generative concept we wish to put forward is: contested,

which in its very basic interpretation signifies that it contains some
form of dispute, conflict and violence. Indeed, urban contestation
has been taking place over centuries, in cities divided by ethnicity
and race (Nightingale, 2012; Tonkiss, 2013). Presently, as a result of
mounting global urban protest, there are significant debates as to
the role of the welfare state, urban planning and urban space as
such, in addressing the challenges of social inequalities and
contested spaces in Western cities (Musterd and Ostendorf, 2013;
Lloyd et al., 2014: Sampson, 2013; Wacquant, 2014) and in the
value of learning from other non-Western contexts (Maloutas and
Fujita, 2012). Attempts to tackle stigmatized urban areas suffering
from spatial and social exclusion have been well documented in the
academic literature (see Marcuse and van Kempen, 2002;
Andersson, 1999; Arbaci, 2007; Peach, 2009; Vaughan and Arbaci,
2011) – in other words, seeing the urban as “a de facto process
oriented, contingent and contested condition” (Boano, 2016a: 52).
However, we do wish to add an emphasis to the word contestation,
which emerged from the Latin etymological origin of contestari
(litem) from com-‘together’ and testari ‘to bear witness’, from testis
‘a witness’, calling somehow each case and each narrative as
material as witnesses as if we were in a legal combat, to contrast
basic theoretical paradigmatic assumptions about the contested
nature of cities.
Urban studies and planning research are associated with
disagreement about theoretical and methodological issues, reflected
in widely different readings across countries, cultures and contexts
(Smets and Salman, 2008). One such approach, attesting to the
array of different interpretations, is the growing body of literature
focusing particularly on extreme ‘divided’ or ‘contested’ cities. The
same cities are repeatedly cited as purportedly manifesting extreme,
ethno-national divisions emanating from the ‘contestation of the
nation state’ (Anderson, 2010; Gaffikin and Morrissey, 2011). To
mention but a few, these include Belfast, Jerusalem, Johannesburg,
Sarajevo, Baghdad, Beirut, Kirkuk and Mostar. These so-called
‘extreme ethno-nationally divided cities’ are claimed to contain
distinctive attributes and tensions positioned within an exclusive
category distinguishing them from other urban areas (Hepburn,
2004; Bollens, 2012; Pullan and Baillie, 2013). Moreover, within this
selected group, urban transformations are analysed through Western
planning perspectives, presupposing its applicability to extreme
cities.
 Much less attention has been given to extreme divided cities’
relevance for other more peaceful cities. Following this brief review
(to be further developed in each case study), we suggest that nearly
all cities that contain ethnic and racial minorities as well as social
and economic inequalities are contested, but, as the book will reveal
in its wide geographical range of local cases and conclusion binding
them together, contested urbanism may have more in common in
different world regions than previously perceived in urban studies
and planning literature. Hence, through a comparative approach
focusing on overarching themes in each case – such as housing,
infrastructure, participation and identity, among others (Rokem,
2016a) – we aimed to illustrate how cities are geopolitical spaces as
they are embedded in a web of contested visions where the
production of space is an inherently conflictive process, manifesting,
producing and reproducing various forms of injustice, as well as
alternative forces of transgression and social projects (Boano et al.,
2013). At the same time, we aim to expose the opportunities and
challenges faced by a growing post-colonial understanding
(Robinson, 2006; Edensor and Jayne, 2011; Oldfield and Parnell,
2014; Roy, 2016) of planning, urban development and urban
geopolitics from a broader global contested urbanism comparative
perspective.
However, we not only suggest a new urban ontology that moves
beyond the ‘West’ or ‘North’, but also wish to add a comparative and
relational understanding of the contested nature that the so-called
southern cities are developing – on the one hand, as a result of
neoliberalism and growing inequalities and, on the other hand, a
surge in ethnic identity politics and nationalism. In doing so, the
book is repositioning contestation at the centre of urban research,
addressing the intersection of spatial and temporal aspects of
conflicts in the production of the city, where intellectual and spatial
categories are able to construct new epistemologies positioning cities
and space in a paradoxical tension (Boano, 2016a)
Moreover, this book adds a renewed urban geopolitical dimension
pointing at the need to rethink current ‘categories’ and ‘labels’ and,
as such, critically questioning the enduring ‘North-Western’/‘South-
Eastern’ divide within urban studies and planning research. The book
offers an in-depth understanding of the worldwide contested nature
of cities with a detailed review from a wide range of local contexts
peripheral yet pertinent to universalizing urban studies and planning
theory beyond the prevailing Euro-American debate.
The book, through its diverse geographical foci, suggests that it is
time to set a new research agenda to regenerate the emerging sub-
field of urban geopolitics bridging the disciplines of political
geography, urban studies and planning. Recent adaptations to classic
geopolitics (Dalby, 1990; Agnew, 2003) have seen an increasing
interest in placing cities beyond the usual geopolitical focus of state
power and territorial control, scaling down to local sites shaping
what we frame here as an emerging ‘urban geopolitical turn’
(Graham, 2004, 2010; Sidaway, 2009; Fregonese, 2009, 2012;
Yacobi, 2009). Urban geopolitics has traditionally stemmed from two
main bodies of research, both using it differently as a synonym for
an urban political geography in an age of terror. First, engaging with
the militarization of urban space, surveillance and security (Graham,
2004, 2010; Gregory, 2011) and asymmetric vertical urban warfare
(Weizman, 2007), this has led to a deeper scrutiny of cities and their
containment of material damage and targeted violence. Second, in
the past two decades, a fast-evolving strand within urban political
geography and planning has focused on urban conflicts within
ethno-nationally contested cities, especially in relation to the role of
planning (Hepburn, 2004; Anderson, 2010; Bollens, 2012; Rokem,
2016a).
In an era of growing neoliberalization, ethno-nationalism and
international migration, there is a growing need to critically examine
urban geopolitics as significant lens to encapsulate recent shifts in
the global urban present. Violence, disaster and division can no
longer be ignored in a century where the majority of the world
population is urban (Fregonese, 2012: 298). In this context,
Newman (2006) proposes that the impact of borders and
territoriality is not diminishing; rather, new scales of territorial
affiliations and borders are recognizable that may be flexible but are
still selective on different geographical scales. In other words, while,
traditionally, the national affiliation of cities has tended to be
attached to the nation state, the question now arises if this still
remains the case. This is echoed by rising claims for urban
recognition and sovereignty from a growing number of immigrants
and refugees living in cities and camps far away from their original
homeland. In this process cities are reshaping both spatially and
socially, creating new forms of urban geopolitical actors and scales
across distant national and cultural conflicts pivoted at the urban
scale.
Specifically important for us and for the cases we selected in the
book is that conflicts and political violence alike have not only direct
spatial implication visible to all in the form of destruction, seclusion
and control, but also unfold at various interconnected scales: global,
territorial, state, urban, human. Their geographical scopes stretch
from the localized sites of citizen contestation and micro-struggles to
the global networks of terror, with different modes of visibility and
intelligibility. Conflicts transform land uses, territorial arrangements,
urban processes and human settlement patterns according to
temporalities that range from short-lived states of emergency to the
longue durée of chronic violence, permanent occupations and
predatory urbanisms (Boano, 2016a). The present international
geopolitical conditions with large-scale forced migration and lack of
local integration is having a substantial impact on the urban
geopolitical condition, with relatively limited attention given to the
‘planning politics nexus’: the relation between planning and politics,
as a non-hierarchical set of interactions, negotiated within the
specific historical, geographical, legal and cultural contexts (Rokem
and Allegra, 2016) and its impact across different supranational,
national and local scales.
The very question that remains open is whether one should
challenge the canonical differentiation between causal categories of
spatial segregation, division and conflict (i.e. driven by market
gentrification, state led or social dynamics, with the latter perhaps
encompassing some form of societal othering of individuals and
communities) (Rokem, 2016b: 406). We suggest there is a need to
move beyond the focus on cities as direct targets of terror and
violence by different state and non-state actors. As such we need to
re-engage in a critical reading of different contestation patterns in
cities and towards a closer assessment of political geography with a
new understating of the post-colonial, ordinary, domestic, embodied
and vertical dimensions to better comprehend recent shifts in urban
geopolitics thinking.
The book brings together a selected group of international
empirically grounded cases engaging with urban planning and
geopolitics from a set of different cities worldwide. In doing so, this
edited volume seeks to argue that it is timely to start learning from,
and compare across, different urban case studies (Abu Lughod,
2007) utilizing IUCs (McFarlane et al., 2016) and advocating staging
comparisons in terms of problematics (Sidaway et al., 2016)
exposing one urban context’s relational and contrastive relevance to
other cities (Rokem, 2016a), suggesting there is a growing need to
rethink ‘labels’ and ‘concepts’ attributed to cities and
neighbourhoods, to better conceptualize and adapt policy and
practice to ethnic minorities and migrants in an ever more fractured
urban geopolitical present. In so doing, we question what we can
learn from clutching the universal complexities of different
contestation patterns in cities not traditionally part of the dominant
theory-building cases – to advance our understanding of urban
studies, development studies and planning in the twenty-first-
century contested urban reality.
The volume is structured across five parts. The Foreword by Sara
Fregonese, concluding conversation with Michal Safier and Afterword
by James D. Sidaway frame some of the central past, present and
future lineages of the urban geopolitical debate. The three chapters
in the opening part, ‘Comparative urban geopolitics’, engage with a
relational and contrastive conceptualization of the value of urban
comparisons learning from: Sarajevo and Beirut; Nairobi and Cape
Town; and Stockholm and Jerusalem. This opening part operates
dual urban comparisons, setting the tone for the next three regional
parts, all with a more particular focus on cities from the Far East
(Karachi, Jakarta and Khulna), Middle East (Famagusta, Acre and
Cairo) and Latin America (Santiago, Medellín and Foz do Iguaqu).
While authors have diverse trans-disciplinary backgrounds spanning
geography, planning, architecture, development studies and urban
sociology, among others, the 12 chapters relate to local empirical
manifestations of contested urbanisms, employing different
methodological techniques and theoretical frameworks. The overall
aim is to advance the cross-disciplinary field of urban geopolitics,
bringing geopolitics into the mainstream agenda of urban studies, to
enhance our understanding of cities as contested nexus points of
social, spatial and political change across different geographical
scales.
In the opening chapter of the volume, Gruia Bădescu provides an
historical comparative interpretation of Sarajevo and Beirut’s shared
antagonistic urban imaginaries of cosmopolitanism and contestation,
as well as experience of urban warfare, segregation and post-war
reconstruction. Scrutinizing how, despite these similarities, the
process of urban reconstruction after the Lebanese Civil War (1975–
90) and the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina (1992–5), respectively,
produced very different outcomes resulting from contrasting post-
war planning frameworks and political settlements, Bădescu, argues
that, in these particular contexts, the city does not emerge as an
autonomous body circumventing national politics – becoming,
instead, an arena of conflicting urban geopolitical articulations of
state-level politics and local ethnic and religious dynamics.
The second chapter moves us to a different regional focus, on two
of the fast-growing African metropolises comparing Nairobi and Cape
Town. Liza Rose Cirolia explains, in her chapter, that in many large
African cities there has been no central entity effectively controlling
development or upholding a ‘public mandate’ to invest in
infrastructure. Non-delivery of infrastructure has become the norm
rather than the exception. Cirolia maintains Nairobi’s urban
development story highlights the multi-dimensional nature of
informality in the city. While, in Cape Town, there is a shift from
apartheid planning that included the creation of zones for white,
coloured and black African households to a more neoliberal-planning
regime, more generally the chapter calls for a need to move beyond
the continued focus on racial segregation that still dominates the
South African cities’ academic urban planning literature.
In the third chapter, Jonathan Rokem closes the first comparative
part with a contrastive and relational assessment of ethnic minority
segregation in two radically different ethnically contested cities. The
central proposition put forward is that there is much to learn from a
comparative investigation of spatial and social policies towards
ethnic minorities in Jerusalem and Stockholm. The chapter facilitates
a multi-scalar comparative conversation of urban difference.
Considering three cross-cutting themes: (1) housing and
development, (2) mobility and transport and (3) local government
and civil society, Rokem suggests that it is timely to start comparing
across different ethnically contested cities as part of a general call to
rethink our understanding of incommensurable cases in the
contemporary urban research and practice.
Opening the second part, covering three South and South East
Asian cities, Sadaf Sultan Khan, Kayvan Karimi and Laura Vaughan
portray an illumining in-depth spatial investigation of the changing
political fortunes of the Muhajir community, Karachi’s largest migrant
group. Karachi, the capital of Pakistan, is well known for its violent
ethnic and sectarian conflict, with different communities striving for
dominance. This chapter aims to articulate the synergistic
relationship between the city’s urban planning strategies and the
complex ethno-politics of its many migrant communities. The
authors suggest that what appears to have happened in Karachi over
the course of the last half-century is a process of inversion of power,
where a national minority has been able to control and transform the
districts in which it constitutes a majority group. This local urban
geopolitical dominance has been achieved through the combined
impact of legitimate political processes and violent street presence.
Next, Pawda F. Tjoa explores the spatial politics of contested urban
space through the lens of ‘marketplace coordination’ in Jakarta by
highlighting the roots of social tension and the escalation of internal
conflict during the period 1997–8. Tjoa reveals how urban policies
geared towards creating order and progress triggered permutations
of social categories within local merchant communities. Conflicts
between market stalls created social tensions that erupted during
the Asian financial crisis. Thus, the ideology of ‘development’
became a catalyst for conflict, which contributed to the persistence
of urban geopolitical fragmentation. Apurba Kumar Podder closes the
second part with a critical and radical rethinking of one aspect of
poverty culture, commonly seen as ‘doing nothing’. While the
academic scholarship often explains doing nothing as idleness or a
response of the poor to societal alienation, Podder offers a novel
perspective exploring a case of an illegal bazaar located in Khulna,
one of the southern cities in Bangladesh. Through a local
ethnographic exploration, he argues that doing nothing should be
understood as an alternative mode of the poor’s occupational urban
geopolitics to sustain in a condition of unequal power relations.
In the opening chapter of the third part, focusing on cities from
the Middle East and North Africa, Moriel Ram exposes theoretical,
thought-provoking formation processes of urban ‘spaces of
exception’, giving the example of the city of Famagusta, in Northern
Cyprus, which has been under Turkish military occupation since
1974. Ram argues that conquest and ensuing Turkish occupation
constantly produces an urban threshold between Famagusta and two
competing spatial processes of encampment, exclusion and
seclusion: the enclosed area of varosha and the campus of Eastern
Mediterranean University. The chapter demonstrates how the
threshold between varosha and Famagusta provides for urban
geopolitical legitimacy of the urban space, while the link between
the campus and the city economically sustain the latter.
The second chapter focuses on the mixed northern Israeli city of
Acre. Nimrod Luz and Nurit Stadler examine the complex and
reflexive relations between urbanity, religion and ethnicity,
suggesting there is much to learn from minority religious claims and
religious spatialities and the challenges of these claims by
hegemonically opposing groups. Focusing on a local urban struggle
revolving around the reconstruction of a mosque by the Muslim
minority, Luz and Stadler critically reflect on the city’s transformation
in terms of its religious voices, planning processes, everyday life and
contested urban geopolitics.
 Cairo concludes the third part. The city has held a central position
as a pivotal intersection of Africa, Asia and Europe. Mohamed Saleh
argues that, for decades, public space in Egypt has been
systematically deprived of its essential symbolic functions. Upon
integrating the country into the global model of neoliberalism, the
state has adopted public policies on various scales, which resulted in
a deep-rooted crisis of participation and identity. Saleh utilizes the
notions of complexity to explore the roots of this crisis, perceiving
the results as a path-dependent structural shift in society, stemming
from thresholds that stretch back from the post-colonial condition to
the rise of neoliberalism and social media.
The fourth part of the book offers an overview of three Latin
American cities, each with distinct urban processes showcasing the
deep social and spatial inequality and the need to diversify the
understanding of local urban geopolitics. Camila Cociña and Ernesto
López-Morales explore the role that gentrification processes can
potentially have in the emergence of non-violent conflict, allowing
local organizations to participate in the encounter of clearly
differentiated positions in Santiago, Chile. Cociña and López-Morales
discuss three local urban cases in which spaces of conflict have
allowed the development of alternatives whereby less affluent
groups manage to remain in gentrifying neighbourhoods. The
authors argue that exploring the notion of conflict as an essential
part of democracy during class encounters in gentrification processes
can be seen as an opportunity to shift urban geopolitical power
struggles through local mobilization of active community groups.
Next, Catalina Ortiz and Camillo Boano put forward a more critical
scrutiny of Medellín’s aspiration of consolidating as a global
benchmark of urban innovation. Urging for the development of new
ways of thinking on how this model enables (or inhibits)
opportunities for spatial justice, Ortiz and Boano reflect on the
production and rearrangement of urban space driven by an urban
geopolitics of informality and the politics of securitization and
control. Focusing specifically on Comuna 8, in the central-east area
of Medellín, and everyday citizens’ politics in informal settlements, it
is argued that the politics of informality operate as a governmental
technology that strategically uses the denial, self-provision or
monumentalization of infrastructure as a means of selectively
legitimizing or criminalizing citizens’ claims over space.
In the final chapter of the fourth part, Peter D. A. wood offers a
methodologically distinctive perspective on how to measure trans-
border participation through urban development planning in Foz do
Iguaçu, Paraná, Brazil. wood suggests that, through use of a Q
methodology, opinions on who participates in development,
particularly within this Brazilian borderland city, can be revealed.
These results are then used to establish three key worldviews
among those involved with or affected by development planning in
the region: local integration optimists, institution sceptics and
nationalists. Through further examination of the collected data, the
author calls for a more critical attitude and geopolitical approach to
urban studies.
In the concluding conversation held throughout a series of
meetings in London in 2015–16, Jonathan Rokem and Camillo Boano
reflect with Michael Safier, who dedicated most of his research to
conceptualizing a cosmopolitan development framework as a means
of promoting peaceful coexistence and dialogue between cultural
groups in urban areas. Starting in the early 1990s, Safier proposed
cosmopolitan urbanization as a way forward to capture all the
varieties of interaction between different cultural traditions,
heritages, identities and practices in urban life (Safier, 1993). In this
concluding conversation we discuss some of Safier’s central ideas,
which are much in line with what this collective book project aims to
offer within the emerging research field of comparative urban
geopolitics. We especially consider connotations concerning
emerging threats from varied and destabilizing combinations of
global, regional and local urban inequalities. Safier asserts there are
two ways to respond to this danger: one based on withdrawal,
underlined by exclusionist, intolerant and even aggressive reaction;
and the other one based on active engagement, borne by inclusion
and coexistence, whereby cities would be central arenas in which
these conflicts and reconciliations cumulate.
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conflicts in the 21st century. City, 20(3): 472–482.
Rokem, J., and Allegra, M. (2016) Planning in turbulent times: exploring planners
agency in Jerusalem. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research.
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Roy, A. (2009) The 21st-century metropolis: new geographies of theory. Regional
Studies, 43(6): 819–830.
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Roy, A. (2016) Who’s afraid of postcolonial theory? International Journal of Urban
and Regional Research, 40(1): 200–209.
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Sheppard, E., Leitner, H., and Maringanti, A. (2013) Provincializing global
urbanism: a manifesto. Urban Geography, 34(7): 893–900.
Sidaway, J. D. (2009) Shadows on the path: negotiating geopolitics on an urban
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1091–1116.
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and Space, 34(5): 777–790.
Smets, P., and Salman, T. (2008) Countering urban segregation: theoretical and
policy innovations from around the globe. Urban Studies, 45(7): 1307–1332.
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Vaughan, L., and Arbaci, S. (2011). The challenges of understanding urban
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Part I
Comparative urban geopolitics
Jonathan Rokem

In recent years a new wave of comparative research has emerged

putting urban comparisons back on the agenda (Nijman, 2007;
Ward, 2008, 2010; McFarlane, 2010; Robinson, 2006, 2011, 2016;
Peck, 2015; Sidaway et al., 2016; McFarlane et al., 2016). However,
most usual forms of comparison conventionally depend on
associating between cities with similar geo-historical settings
(McFarlane and Robinson, 2012) and are commonly based on a few
selected cities in North America and Europe (Roy, 2009; Peck, 2015).
With the aim of moving away from comparing similar cases in
Euro-America, the three chapters in this first part of the book cover
a wide range of urban geopolitical processes in different regional
settings and within diverse theoretical discourses, with the aim of
placing more emphasis on difference in comparative urban research.
As such, the overall conceptual structure of this first part is an
introductory lens for the whole book, questioning the position of
post-colonial theory within urban studies’ enduring Euro-centric
academic knowledge production, methodological regionalism and
incommensurability. Each of the three chapters establishes a
comparative conversation of what we can learn from different urban
contexts. In the first chapter, Gruia Bădescu compares post-war
reconstruction in two contested cities: Sarajevo and Beirut. Liza Rose
Cirolia explores planning innovations in two African cities, Nairobi
and Cape Town, in the second chapter. And, in the third chapter,
Jonathan Rokem contrasts urban ethnic segregation in different
contested cities: Jerusalem and Stockholm. The authors of the three
chapters suggest different ways to rethink current theoretical
categories and labels, based on empirical comparative research in
two cities, representing both relational and contrastive – yet radically
different – visions and division patterns.

References
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International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 34(4): 725–42.
McFarlane, C., and Robinson, J. (2012) Introduction: experiments in comparative
urbanism, Urban Geography, 33(6): 765–73.
McFarlane, C., Silver, J., and Truelove, Y. (2016) Cities within cities: intra-urban
comparison of infrastructure in Mumbai, Delhi and Cape Town, Urban
Geography, doi: 10.1080/02723638.2016.1243386.
Nijman, J. (2007) Introduction: comparative urbanism. Urban Geography, 28(1):
1–6.
Peck, J. (2015) Cities beyond compare? Regional Studies, 49(1): 183–6.
Robinson, J. (2006) Ordinary Cities: Between Modernity and Development. London
and New York: Routledge.
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International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 35(1): 1–23.
Robinson, J. (2016) Thinking cities through elsewhere: comparative tactics for a
more global urban studies. Progress in Human Geography, 40(1): 3–29.
Roy, A. (2009) The 21st-century metropolis: new geographies of theory. Regional
Studies, 43(6): 819–30.
Sidaway, J. D., Ho, E. L. E., Rigg, J. D., and Woon, C. Y. (2016) Area studies and
geography: trajectories and manifesto. Environment and Planning D: Society
and Space, 34(5): 777–90.
Ward, K. (2008) Editorial: toward a comparative (re)turn in urban studies? Some
reflections. Urban Geography, 29(5): 405–10.
Ward, K. (2010) Towards a relational comparative approach to the study of cities.
Progress in Human Geography, 34(4): 471–87.
1 Post-war reconstruction in
contested cities
Comparing urban outcomes in Sarajevo and Beirut

Gruia Bădescu

Introduction
Cities of the Balkans and the Middle East have been traditionally
discussed in relationship to diversity, exchange and cosmopolitanism,
but also to conflict and urban violence (Ilbert, 1996; Mazower, 2005;
Driessen, 2005; Freitag and Lafi, 2014; Freitag et al., 2015). An
increasing recent focus on studying urban conflicts has prompted the
analysis of several cities in the region under the umbrella of ‘divided
city in contested states’ research, ranging from Nicosia to Jerusalem,
and either pointing out their planning conundrums (Bollens, 2006,
2012; Pullan, 2013) or exploring and situating everyday practices in
such contested urban space (Bakshi, 2011, 2014; Pullan and Baillie,
2013; Pullan et al., 2013). Beirut and Sarajevo – contextualized and
framed differently in area studies research, but brought together by
the divided and contested cities work – have been highlighted for
showcasing the epitome of urban conflicts: war in the city, or,
according to Bogdanović (1993) and Coward (2006, 2009), urbicide
– a war on the city, urban space and urbanity. ‘Urbicide’, as a key
new term in urban geopolitics (Graham, 2004; Fregonese, 2009) led
to close investigations of meanings of destruction of urban
environment in conflict. Through their wartime experience, Beirut –
scene of the Lebanese Civil War (1975–90) and aerial attacks by
Israel in 2006 – and Sarajevo under siege as part of the war in
Bosnia and Herzegovina (1992–5) – were shaped as urban
geopolitical spaces. As Fregonese (2009: 317) showed in her study
of wartime Beirut, through various practices, including assault and
destruction, possession and partition, Beirut’s urban environment
became geopolitical, as “it was the product and the tool of the re-
territorialisation of the city”. However, as Brand and Fregonese point
out (2013), most literature has focused on the war period itself; they
call for an investigation of processes occurring in the aftermath.
Post-war reconstruction is such a process that provides a lens to
rethink planning and urban geopolitics in contested cities, as well as
their articulations in everyday practices. This chapter examines the
process of urban-architectural post-war reconstruction in Beirut and
Sarajevo in an urban geopolitical frame. It explores how urban
environment both responds to and shapes territorialization processes
and how the discussion of urban geopolitics and the relationship
between urban space and the state can be enriched by urban
comparisons.
Beirut and Sarajevo are particularly fit for a comparison. The two
cities share an urban history including a long period of Ottoman rule
followed by the protectorate of a European power (the Habsburg
state and France, respectively). After the Second world war, the two
cities witnessed a significant expansion and embracement of
architectural modernism in new state frameworks (socialist
Yugoslavia and independent Lebanon). Beirut had a reputation as
the Paris of the Middle East, a sophisticated, thriving city at the edge
of the Mediterranean (Sawalha, 2010), while Sarajevo was a
celebrated symbol of urban coexistence, especially after the 1984
winter Olympics, which portrayed it to the world as a confident place
of harmonious relations between a diverse population. In fact, both
cities were hailed as examples of harmonious, pluralistic urban
societies (Donia, 2006; Saliba, 1998). The populations of both cities
included a mix of Christians and Muslims who shared a common
language – Arabic in Beirut and what was called, for most of the
twentieth century, Serbo-Croatian in Sarajevo. The urban imaginaries
Another random document with
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 “Ainsi que mes chagrins, mes beaux jours sont
passés,
Je ne sens plus l’aigreur de ma bile première,
Et laisse aux froids rimeurs, une libre
carrière[81].”

Boileau, Epist. 5. à M. Guilléraques.

There are, doubtless, besides those which I have enumerated,

many tombs deserving of notice; but I have specified these, on
account of the celebrity of the artists, or that of the persons whose
memory the monuments were intended to record. I send you a very
imperfect account, yet it is the result of a six hours’ visit, made with
no little care and attention.
Le Noir’s catalogue, which, I understand, is now translating into
english, concludes with a curious account of the state in which the
bodies of the former kings of France were found at St. Denys, when,
in the year 1793, the national convention, with a savage disregard of
decency, and with a contempt for departed grandeur scarcely
credible, ordered that the kings, princes, and other great men, who
had for fifteen hundred years lain in peace at St. Denys, should be
dragged from their tombs, in order that the lead, of which their coffins
were made, should be converted into ball.
You will be surprised to hear, that the celebrated Turenne,
preserved like a mummy, was instantly recognized by the
resemblance which he still bore to his busts and pictures; and Henry
the fourth was yet so perfect, (though he died in 1610), that not a
feature was altered.
This account is already of such a length, that I shall make no
apology for abruptly concluding it.
I am, &c.

POSTSCRIPT.
 Returning home to day, at half past four o’clock, from viewing
some of the sights, (which I have mentioned in my letter), we found a
messenger waiting with a note from the Thuilleries. It proved to be
an invitation to Mrs. ⸺, from the first consul, asking her to dinner
the same day at five. She dressed as quickly as possible, and drove
to the palace. She is just returned; and from her statement, I send
you the following short account.
The entertainment was extremely elegant, and the sight very
striking. More than two hundred persons sat down to table in a
splendid apartment. The company consisted, besides the family of
Bonaparte, of the ministers, the ambassadors, several generals,
senators, counsellors of state, and other constituted authorities. The
number of women present was by no means in proportion to that of
the men, and did not exceed fifteen. All the english ladies, who had
been presented to madame Bonaparte, were invited (though not
their husbands) to this entertainment; but it happened, that only two
remained at Paris.
The dinner was served entirely on plate and Sèvre china, the latter
bearing the letter B on every dish, and every plate; and the plateau
was covered with moss, out of which arose innumerable natural
flowers, the odour of which perfumed the whole room.
The first consul and madame Bonaparte conducted themselves
with much ease, and spoke very affably to those around them.
The servants were numerous, splendidly dressed, and highly
attentive. The dinner lasted more than two hours.
 LETTER XXX.
General account of literary establishments at Paris.—National library.—
Manuscripts.—Memoirs of his own times, by Lewis XIV.—Fac simile
of a love letter of Henry IV.—Cabinet of medals.—Cabinet of
engravings, &c.—Library of the Pantheon.—Mazarine library.—Library
of the Institute.—Libraries of the senate, the legislative body, and
tribunate.—The Lycées, now called les Athénées.—Admirable
lectures given at one of them.—Professors Fourcroy, Cuvier, and la
Harpe.—“L’Institute national.”—“Jardin national des Plantes”—
Collection of birds, plants, fossils, and insects, in the house attached
to the “Jardin des Plantes.”—“Cabinet de l’École des Mines, à l’Hôtel
des Monnoies.”—Great opportunities afforded at Paris of cultivating
science and literature in all their various branches.

Paris, may the 10th, 1802 (20 floréal.)

my dear sir,
I have postponed speaking to you of the literary establishments of
Paris, till my residence here had been sufficiently long to enable me
to give my opinion with some degree of certainty.
Perhaps there is no town in the known world, which affords such
favourable opportunities of acquiring and cultivating knowledge, as
that from which I am now writing. On this subject, equality in the best
sense exists; and while the poor man has the finest libraries, and
most extensive collections opened to his use, without any expense
whatever, he, whose circumstances are moderately easy, obtains,
for a trifling consideration, every possible means of additional
improvement.
The national library, which existed during the monarchy, and was
founded by Charles the fifth, occupies a large building in the rue de
la Loi (ci-devant de Richelieu). An elegant staircase, painted by
Pelegrini, leads to the spacious apartments on the first floor, which
take up three sides of the large court by which you enter, and which
contain no less than three hundred thousand printed volumes. Five
or six rooms, well lighted and well aired, offer on each side the best
books, in every science and in every language. Tables are placed for
the convenience of students, and attentive librarians civilly deliver
the works which are asked for.
In the second room is a curious piece of workmanship, called “le
Parnasse françois[82]” by Titon Dutillet, in which the different poets
and writers of France are represented as climbing up the steep
ascent of that difficult but inspired mountain. In my opinion, it
deserves attention more as a specimen of national taste, and private
industry, than as a production either of genius or of beauty.
In the third “salon” are the celebrated globes, the one celestial, the
other terrestrial, made in 1683, by the jesuit Coronelli, for the
cardinal d’Estrées. They are of immense dimensions, but require
new painting; as, in the first place, they were made before the last
discoveries, and secondly, the colours are almost entirely effaced by
the lapse of time.
This admirable library, which also contains collections of medals,
and other curiosities, is open to all persons who choose to attend as
students, without any expense, recommendation, or favour, every
day in the week; but, to prevent the labours of these being
interrupted, the visits of such as only come from motives of curiosity
are limited to two days in seven. I saw, with pleasure, that the object
of this splendid institution is fully answered. Forty or fifty young men,
deeply intent on the subject of their inquiries, were seated in different
parts of the room, and seemed to pursue, with enthusiasm, those
studies, which the liberality of their country thus afforded them the
means of cultivating.
The gallery of manuscripts (called the gallery of Mazarine)
contains thirty thousand volumes, generally on the history of France,
and more particularly relating to facts which have taken place since
the reign of Lewis XI, twenty-five thousand of which are in learned or
foreign languages. The librarian, to whose care these precious
papers are entrusted, was known to a gentleman who accompanied
me, and through his goodness we saw several, which are not
commonly exhibited.
 I was much surprised at finding, in the hand writing of Lewis XIV.
memoirs of his own times, so accurately taken, that, with very little
difficulty, they might be prepared for the press. I understand that a
gentleman, belonging to the library, began this useful task, and had
made considerable progress, when a sudden illness deprived his
country and the literary world of his services.
I was not a little entertained with the love letters of Henry IV.,
which are in perfect preservation, and some of which have, I believe,
been published. The following is a fac simile of one, which
particularly attracted my notice:

“Mon cher cœur, nous venons de dyner

ceans, et sommes fort sous. Je
vous veyrré devant que partyre de Parys
vous cherryre non comme yl
faut, mes comme je pourre
Ce porteur me haste sy fort que
je ne vous puys fayre que ce
mot bonsoyr le cœur a moy je
te bese un mylyon de foys

8
ce xiiiiime octobre 8 h 8
8

HENRY[83].”

As the tokens of regard, which the gallant Henry thought his

mistress deserved, were only limited in number to a million, we
cannot too much admire the prudence with which he, who was never
known to break his word, promised to testify his affection, not
according to the merit of the lady, but to the powers of her lover.
The five large rooms on the second floor contain the titles and
genealogies of private families, which, though forbidden, since the
revolution, to be kept by individuals, are here preserved, in order to
ascertain the claims of property, and to assist the researches of
historians. They are contained in five thousand boxes, or porte-
feuilles, and are arranged and labelled with the greatest precision.
The cabinet of medals is ornamented by drawings over the doors
by Boucher; by three large pictures, by Natoire, representing Thalia,
Calliope, and Terpsichore; by three of Carlo Vanloo, representing
Psyche led by Hymen, the inventress of the flute, and the three
protectors of the Muses. The cabinet of antiques, above stairs,
contains the busts, vases, inscriptions, instruments of sacrifice, &c.
collected by the celebrated Caylus.
The cabinet of engravings, which occupies what is called, in
France, the “entresol,” or the floor between the first and second,
consists of five thousand volumes, divided into twelve classes. The
first contains sculptors, architects, engineers, and engravers,
arranged in schools. The second, prints, emblems, and devices of
piety. The third, greek and roman fables and antiquities. The fourth,
medals, coins, and arms. The fifth, public festivals, cavalcades, and
tournaments. The sixth, arts and mathematics. The seventh, prints
relating to romances and works of pleasantry. The eighth, natural
history in all its branches. The ninth, geography. The tenth, plans
and views of ancient and modern edifices. The eleventh, portraits of
persons, of all conditions, to the number of fifty thousand; and the
twelfth, a collection of fashions and costumes of almost every
country in the world, from the porte-feuille of Gaigniéres. This last
class is said to contain the most extensive collection yet known of
french fashions, from the time of Clovis to the present age. The
greater part of the sheets are coloured, some are on vellum, copied
from glass windows, from pieces of tapestry, and from figures on
tombs. The picture of king John, being the first specimen of french
painting, is found in this collection. It is well preserved.
I ought not to conclude my account of the national library without
mentioning, that among the manuscripts there are several in the
persian, arabic, and Chinese languages.
Besides the “national library,” there is the library of the Pantheon
(or St. Généviève), consisting of eighty thousand volumes, and two
thousand manuscripts, open every day from ten till two o’clock.
 The Mazarine library, or (“des quatre nations,”) is open every day,
from ten till two o’clock (excepting on the 5th and 10th of each
month), and contains sixty thousand volumes.
The library of the “Institute” is open every day to members, and
every 15th of the month to the public.
The legislature, the tribunate, the senate, and the other constituted
authorities, have also their libraries.
In addition to these sources of knowledge, there are several
literary institutions, called, when I first came here, “des Lycées, or
Lyceums,” but which, in consequence of the national colleges lately
established having taken that name, have changed theirs, and
assumed the appellation of “des Athénées.” The most distinguished
of these, “le Lycée,” (or, according to its new title, “l’Athénée,”),
“republicain,” has been the principal source of my amusement at
Paris. It consists of annual subscribers, who, for the moderate sum
of four louis, enjoy all its benefits. The society has a large floor, or
apartment, situate near the “Palais Royal,” (in a street called by its
name); and it is open the whole of every day for the use of the
subscribers. There is a small library, where all the periodical
publications and newspapers are taken in; and while three or four
rooms are appropriated to conversation, one is devoted to reading,
and profound silence is there ordered and maintained. In addition to
these, there is an excellent lecture room, with all the necessary
apparatus for experiments, in which the ablest men in France appear
as professors. The subject of the lectures, which are regularly given,
always twice, and frequently three times, in the course of the day,
are literature, the sciences, and modern languages. When I add, that
Fourcroy takes the chymical department, that Cuvier reads on
natural history, and that la Harpe, till banished by the government,
was the professor of literature, you will readily allow, that no
establishment can be better organized. Besides these, “Hassenfratz”
gives very good lectures on agriculture, and the studies connected
with that science. “Sué,” as an anatomist, is justly celebrated; and
the other professors, in their different lines, prove themselves well
qualified for the tasks assigned them. With “Fourcroy,” and “Cuvier,”
I was particularly delighted; and it is impossible, without having
heard them, to form an idea of the clearness and eloquence with
which they explain the subjects of their respective departments. As
to “la Harpe” I must confess, I was not a little disappointed. From his
great renown, and from the encomiums past on him, in early life, by
Voltaire, I expected to have been at once pleased, instructed, and
surprised. In these hopes I was strongly encouraged by the manner
in which his lectures were spoken, of at Paris, and by the crowds
which flocked to the “Lycée,” whenever it was his turn to fill the chair.
Dreadful was my disappointment, when, at last, I heard him.
Pompignan, la Motte, Fontenelle, and some other authors of that
stamp, were the subjects of his discourses; and, beginning with
telling us that these writers were either entirely forgotten, or
deserved to be so, he continued, for whole days together, to drag
their ghosts before his audience, whom he seemed to convert into a
“tribunal révolutionaire” of criticism, and to attack their memory with
all the warmth and violence of an “accusateur public.” These
philippics against dead and neglected authors, filled up with long
quotations from the works which he ridiculed, interlarded with attacks
on those philosophical and political principles of which he was
originally the ardent advocate, and enlivened now and then with a
joke, and sometimes with an anecdote, constituted the whole merit
of his lectures. Yet the members of the “Lycée” heard him with
wonder and admiration; and whenever he threw down his book,
turned round with a look of self-complacence, or filled his tumbler
with lemonade from the decanter always placed by his side, the
signal was instantly taken, and loud and repeated applauses
thundered from every corner of the room. To account for this
partiality, I must repeat, that every thing at Paris is ruled by fashion;
and la Harpe being generally considered as the most distinguished
literary man now alive, every thing which fell from his tongue was
necessarily excellent; and I have no doubt, that if he had contented
himself with reading an article from one of the newspapers of the
morning, he would have been equally admired and as warmly
applauded.
The “Lycée” is altogether a most excellent establishment; and,
considering, that two lectures, and frequently three, are given six
days in every week, and that these lectures are included in the
subscription, the price of four louis is very moderate.
I cannot speak properly of this institution as a place of society, as I
seldom staid there after the conclusion of the lectures; but I am told,
that the members are, generally speaking, respectable men. The
rooms are constantly full, and some persons may be said nearly to
pass their lives there, since they are scarcely ever absent, except at
the hour of dinner. I think it not improbable, that much amusement
may be found in the conversation of the members; but I confine my
recommendation to the advantages which the “Lycée” affords, as an
easy source of profitable knowledge.
“L’Institut national,” that celebrated society, which has succeeded
“l’académie française,” which is held up as the great republican
repository of genius and learning, and into which admittance is
solicited with so much eagerness, both at home and abroad,
consists of one hundred and forty-four members resident at Paris,
and of twenty-four foreign associates. It is divided into three classes;
the sciences, physical and mathematical; the sciences, moral and
political; literature and the fine arts. Each of these classes is again
subdivided.
The “Institut” has a public séance, or meeting, on the 15th of every
month. I was present at one of these assemblies; and I am ashamed
to confess, that I had difficulty in refraining from laughter. The society
holds its sittings in a spacious room in the palace of the Louvre. The
members were seated in such silent, solemn state, each with his
reading desk, books, ink, and wax lights before him, while a dull and
uninteresting paper was reading, that their gravity produced the
opposite effect on me, and “malgré” my respect for the
establishment, and for those who belong to it, it was not without a
struggle that I composed my features, and checked the impulse of
nature. At last, fortunately for me, “Colin d’Harleville,” a dramatic
writer of merit, ascended the rostrum, and read a kind of funeral
oration, or eulogy, on the memory of an author of reputation, lately
dead. The simplicity of the speaker’s manner, the harmony of his
voice, and the feeling which he displayed, in deploring the loss and
proving the worth of his friend, charmed every ear; and,
notwithstanding the pompous faces which surrounded me, I became
as melancholy as they wished to appear serious. The members of
“l’institut national” wear a blue cloth uniform, richly embroidered with
silk of the same colour.
The “Jardin national des Plantes[84],” founded originally by Buffon,
is one of the most interesting objects at Paris. Naturalists, and
persons fond of botany, have here every opportunity of cultivating
those useful studies, and of gratifying, in the amplest manner, their
favourite taste. The garden itself, which is extensive, and reaches to
the river, contains every kind of curious and exotic plant. There is a
greenhouse likewise, filled with such trees, the tender nature of
which cannot bear the coldness of a northern atmosphere.
There is also a ménagerie, or collection of animals, among which
every kind of fierce, rare, and foreign quadrupeds may be found. On
my first arrival at Paris, there were two elephants, of different sizes,
who had lived several years together in the same stable. They were
of very considerable dimensions, equal to those, the effigy of which
is sometimes seen on a London stage. The male has lately died, and
“Cuvier” is to anatomise the body, and give a lecture on the subject.
The female, for some time after the death of her companion, showed
evident symptoms of grief, and even refused, at first, every kind of
nourishment. The house attached to “le Jardin des Plantes” is filled
with a precious collection of curiosities in natural history, properly
arranged, and correctly named. Several rooms are filled with these
valuable objects; and I am told, by persons acquainted with such
subjects, that very little is wanting to make this dépôt complete.
Stuffed quadrupeds[85], birds, plants, fossils, fish, and shells, offer
every kind of variety; and even the ignorant man finds here a source
of never-failing amusement. The collection of insects is particularly
curious and extensive. I believe it is considered as the finest in the
world.
The “Jardin des Plantes,” like every other national establishment
at Paris, is seen gratuitously, and is open to foreigners every day,
while frenchmen are only admitted three or four times in each week.
It is impossible to mention too often, or to admire too highly, a trait of
hospitality so truly magnificent.
The “cabinet de l’École des Mines” is a superb establishment. It is
situate in the principal building towards the key of the “hôtel des
Monnaies.” It was formed in 1778, of the collection which the famous
mineralogist, le Sage, was eighteen years in putting together. The
middle of the cabinet forms an amphitheatre, capable of containing
two hundred persons. Glass cases enclose, in the finest order,
minerals of every kind, and from every part of the world. Four other
separate cases offer models of machinery. On the stairs, leading to
the gallery, is the bust of monsieur le Sage, which was placed there
by the gratitude of his pupils. The gallery itself is surrounded with
cases, containing specimens of the productions of mines, too
numerous to be placed with those which are in the first cabinet of
mines. The interior of the cabinet is 45 feet long, by 38 wide, and 40
feet high. All the english, who have seen “l’École des Mines,” agree,
in speaking of it as one of the most interesting sights of this
interesting capital[86].
Beside the great establishments which I have mentioned, there
are several others, which it would be an endless task to attempt to
specify.
There are also many “lycées” or “athénées,” beside that of which I
have spoken. There are likewise private subscription lectures on all
subjects, many of which are of high repute, such as those of Mr.
Charles on natural philosophy, of the excellence of whose
experiments, and the clearness of whose discourses, I hear a very
favourable account.
The english, german, and italian languages, are taught by
professors at the different “lycées,” by particular subscription, and for
moderate sums in other places. In short, there is no literary pursuit,
of any kind, which any man, in any circumstances, may not cultivate
with success at Paris.
Fortitude is necessary to resist the opportunities of committing
crimes, if the individual be poor, and of falling into the temptations of
pleasure, if he happen to be rich. Guarded against these respective
evils, the industrious scholar, whether covered with rags, or “clad
every day in purple,” may move on in the career of letters with every
possible advantage, and with the certitude of, at last, obtaining the
utmost object of his wishes. If any equality exist in France, it is found
in the fount of knowledge, which literally

“⸺In patriam populumque fluxit.”

In addition to the opportunities afforded for literary improvement

already mentioned, the price of books is moderate; and “cabinets
litéraires” offer in every quarter of the town, and almost in every
street, newspapers, pamphlets, and periodical works.
Paris, however, does not possess many circulating libraries, and of
the few which exist, I can give no favourable account. Perhaps the
facility with which works of value are consulted, and the trifle for
which those of the day are bought, are the reasons of this deficiency.
It is, however, a considerable convenience wanting in so great a city;
and I think that such an establishment, on a liberal and extended
scale, would be a profitable and useful subject of speculation.
I have said nothing of “la Société des belles Lettres” of “la Société
de Médecine” of “la Société d’Institution,” &c. Were I to enumerate all
the useful establishments, both public and private, connected with
literature, my letter would soon be swelled into a volume, and that
even of no small dimensions. I shall, therefore, now conclude my
account by observing, that whatever are the particular objects, to
which a studious man wishes to direct his attention, “quod petit hic
est,” he will find here all the facilities which he can possibly desire for
pursuing his favourite science, with little or no expense and great
advantage.
I am, &c.
 LETTER XXXI.
Calculation and estimate of expenses at Paris.—List of hotels, traiteurs,
&c.

Paris, may the 12th, 1802, (22 floréal.)

my dear sir,
You know how much I dislike the petty detail of economical
arrangements, and will therefore pardon me for having so long
delayed to speak to you of the expenses and mode of living at Paris.
I have not forgotten your queries, and will, in this letter, endeavour to
answer them as fully as possible. You will, at least, derive one
advantage from my apparent neglect; that the information which I
shall now send you, is not hastily given, but the result of experience,
gained during a residence of nearly seven months.
Persons who have represented Paris (to use a vulgar phrase) as a
cheap place, have either been greatly deceived themselves, or have
intended purposely to deceive. The difference between the expense
of living in London and in Paris, appears to me infinitely less than it is
generally supposed. It is true, indeed, that a french family will
apparently support a much more elegant establishment on a given
income, than an english one can in London; but I believe the cause
arises almost entirely from the superiour economy and arrangement
of the former, from the sparing system observed in the interiour of
private houses, and from the constant and unvarying attention to the
minutiæ of every disbursement. Though the table of a Parisian
boasts, when company are invited, every kind of luxury, yet I have
reason to suspect, that, on ordinary occasions, “le bouilli[87],” and “le
vin ordinaire,” form its principal support. A carriage, which has been
in a family twenty or thirty years, is treated with all the respect due to
its antiquity, and is seldom or ever discarded on account of its
oldfashioned shape or faded colour; and horses, used only now and
then, may be fed on hay and straw. Liveries are forbidden by the law;
and servants are therefore permitted to wait in the tattered garments
which their present master has left off, or in those which they have
collected in a former service.
The drawing-rooms, and “salles à manger,” are lighted, even at
the largest assemblies, with oil, instead of wax; and antichambers
and staircases are so dark, that to find one’s way into the principal
apartment is generally a service of difficulty, if not of danger. As to
fire, on common occasions, one in the bed room either of “madame,”
or “monsieur,” is thought sufficient, with the addition of a “poële,” or
stove, which is so contrived, as to heat both the eating room, and the
antichamber, in which latter the servants always sit. In respect to
dress, an old great coat (or “riding coat,” as they call it) is often worn
in the house, by gentlemen, and the belles who appear with the
greatest splendour in the evening, sometimes pass their morning in
a powdering gown, or “robe de chambre.”
The same kind of rigid economy is observed in their amusements.
A family of distinction will occupy a box “au second, or au
bagnoir[88],” to save a few livres; and I knew a young lady of
considerable fortune, who expressed an anxious wish to see the first
appearance of Vestris, and who, when a place was offered her,
refused it, malgré the general passion for spectacles, and the
celebrity of this, when she found that the price of the ticket was nine
francs (or seven and sixpence english). I have entered into this
explanation, to account for the apparently splendid establishments of
persons of moderate fortunes, which might otherwise seem to
contradict the opinion which I am about to give, and which I have
already hinted.
I repeat, then, that an english family settling here[89], with english
ideas and english habits, would spend very little less than they would
do in London, with a similar establishment.
To enable you to judge for yourself on this subject, I shall mention
the prices of the most essential articles of expense; some of which
are lower, while others are infinitely higher.
Meat is much cheaper, being only eleven or twelve sols per pound
(or five or six pence english).
 Bread bears, at present, nearly the same price in the two
countries.
The keep of horses costs infinitely less at Paris, than in London.
Poultry is cheaper; and wine of the best kind may be bought for
something more than we pay for good port.
On the other hand, house rent is equally dear, if not dearer.
Furniture is exorbitant; and dress of all kinds, both for men and
women (only excepting shoes and gloves) is, beyond comparison,
dearer in price, and more expensive in its kind.
The price of amusements, in the first places, is nearly the same at
the large theatres of Paris, as at those of London; and spectacles,
being infinitely more frequented at the former than in the latter city,
much more is spent, in this article, in the one than in the other
capital.
Groceries are dearer, and fuel at least double. Putting these
articles, the one against the other, perhaps with economy eleven
hundred pounds in Paris might purchase as many conveniences as
twelve in London. But I think even this difference is liberally allowed.
Having given this rough calculation of family expenses, I shall
proceed to speak more particularly of those of a foreigner, or
temporary resident. On this point I can be more positive, having
experience for my guide.
A job carriage and pair of horses cost from twenty to twenty two
louis per month, according to the manner in which you are served. A
pair of horses, without the hire of a carriage, may be had for fifteen
or sixteen louis per month. In both cases the coachman is paid by
the jobman; but the former expects a trifle, as a mark of your
approbation.
A “laquais de place” asks four, but will take three, livres (or half a
crown English) per day.
Apartments vary so infinitely in price, according to the part of the
town where they are situate, according to the number of rooms
wanted, according to the height of the floor, and, above all, according
to the bargain made by the individual wanting them, that it is very
difficult to fix any thing like an average. I shall only say, generally,
that I think a single man may be well lodged (at a price proportioned
to the accommodation which he requires) from five to twelve louis
per month; and a family of two or three persons, with as many
servants, from twelve to thirty louis.
A “traiteur” will supply a dinner at six livres (or five shillings) per
head; but the fare will neither be very good, nor very abundant.
Wine, of the best quality, if taken from the “traiteur,” or the master
of the hotel, will cost from five to six livres the bottle. The same may
be had from a wine merchant at about half the price. I ought to add,
that it is not expected here, as in England, that the wine should
necessarily be ordered from the person who supplies your table.
The price of washing is greater than in London; and the english
ladies complain much of the manner in which it is executed.
Fuel is immensely dear. A “voie de bois,” or load of wood, the
contents of which one fire will consume in ten days, costs about
thirty two or thirty three livres (making about twenty six or twenty
seven shillings english.)
About nine livres (or seven shillings and sixpence) are paid for
admittance in the first places for each person at the “opera,” at “le
théâtre de la Feydeau,” and at “le théâtre de la rue Favart;” at the
“théâtre françois” six livres, twelve sols, (or five shillings and
sixpence english) and in the little theatres, half a crown, or three
shillings. I cannot give the prices exactly, as they vary according to
the manner in which you go to the play-house. In taking a box, more
is paid for each ticket, than what is otherwise paid simply for the
admittance of each individual at the door.
Clothing is very expensive. A plain frock of superfine cloth costs
from four louis to five and a half, according to the fashion of the
tailor: and I am told, that ladies’ muslins are at least four times
dearer than in London.
About lodgings, it is very necessary that those who intend visiting
Paris should make previous arrangements. The hotels are not so
numerous as before the revolution; and the difficulty of getting well
accommodated is much greater than any one, who has not been
here, can possibly conceive. Great advantage is also taken of the
situation of strangers, who arrive (unprepared) at one of these
houses with post horses, the drivers of which are always impatient,
and very often impertinent, if you detain them long in seeing rooms,
or go to several hotels, before you are settled.
To enable you and your friends to form some idea of the merits of
the different hotels, and accordingly to give directions to your
correspondents, I will add a list and short account of the most
celebrated.
“L’Hôtel de Grange Batelière, rue de Grange Batelière,” in the
Chaussée Dantin, (where Lord Cornwallis lodged) is a large and
spacious house, in which there are many handsome apartments. It
has also the advantage of a fine and extensive garden. I think I have
heard, that the charges here are rather high. The situation of the
house is excellent; adjoining the Boulevard, nearly opposite “la rue
de la Loi (or de Richelieu),” and in that part of the town, which is now
esteemed the most fashionable.
“L’Hôtel de l’Empire,” rue Cerruti, (formerly the private house of M.
la Borde, the king’s Banker) is much frequented by the english. It is
of course expensive. The high reputation which this hotel enjoys,
induced me to go there on my first arrival. I was much disappointed. I
did not find either the lodgings good, or the cooking very superiour.
The principal apartment is certainly very splendid, the price of which
is ninety louis per month; but the other rooms have nothing very
particular to recommend them. Every kind of refreshment is found in
the house, and charged by the article, as at the hotels in London,
and at about the same prices.
This house is also in the “Chaussée Dantin,” and not far distant
from “l’Hôtel de Grange Batelière.”
In the “rue de la Loi,” (or “de Richelieu”) there are several hotels;
but the situation, though extremely central and convenient, has the
disadvantage of being very noisy. The upper part of the street, near
the Boulevard, is the most agreeable; and in that position are “l’Hôtel
de l’Europe,” and “l’Hôtel des Étrangers.” They appear good houses.
I know nothing of their character.
“L’Hôtel d’Angleterre, rue des Filles de St. Thomas,” very near the
“rue de la Loi,” has been inhabited by several English this winter.
The charges are said to be expensive. The situation is convenient;
but it is noisy, and surrounded by houses.
“L’Hôtel des Étrangers, rue Vivienne,” very near the “rue de la Loi,”
and the “Palais Royal,” is also in the centre of the town. This house I
have heard more generally commended by those who have lodged
there, as to its prices, accommodations, and kitchen, than any other
at Paris; but I cannot say I like the street where it stands, which is
both close and dirty.
“L’Hôtel de Mirabeau, rue de Helder,” is in a new street, near the
Boulevard. It seems a good house. I do not know its character.
The two hotels, the situation of which is the most agreeable, being
both near the Boulevard, the Thuilleries, and the Champs Elisées,
are “l’Hôtel de Courlande, place Louis XV, (or de la Concorde”), and
“l’Hôtel des Étrangers, rue Royale (or de la Concorde).” The former
is part of that fine building, the “Garde Meuble,” and stands in the
most beautiful “place,” or square, of Paris. The windows command a
delightful view of the “place,” the bridge, the river, the Thuilleries, and
Champs Elisées. The house is newly furnished, and only lately
opened. I am sorry to add, that it consists but of few apartments; but
those which there are, are elegant and spacious. The prices are
extremely high. I was asked forty louis a month for a second floor.
The other house, I mean “l’Hôtel des Étrangers, rue Royale (or de
la Concorde)” standing in a very wide street, which runs from the
Boulevard to “la place Louis XV,” has equal advantages as to the
neighbourhood of all the public walks, with the hotel of which I spoke
last; but it does not command the same view. I am forced also to
mention, having lived two months in the house, that the landlord is a
very insolent fellow, and his wife, if possible, more impertinent than
himself.
 There are three small hotels, called, “l’Hôtel de Galle,” “l’Hôtel des
Quinz Vingts,” and “l’Hôtel de Carousel,” all in the immediate
neighbourhood of the palace of the Thuilleries, of which each
commands a view. A single man would be agreeably lodged at one
of these; but I should not suppose, that there was sufficient
accommodation at either for a family consisting of several persons.
In the “Fauxbourg St. Germain,” the hotels formerly frequented by
the english either exist no more, or have lost their reputation. Those
only which are of any repute in this part of the town, seem to be
“l’Hôtel de Rome, rue St. Dominique,” where there are several
handsome apartments, more remarkable for their size than their
cleanliness; and “l’Hôtel de Marengo,” in the same street, and next
door to the former. The lodgings of the latter are good; but some
friends of mine, who lived there, complained much of the
disagreeable state, in which they found the beds. Both these hotels
have good gardens.
“L’Hôtel de Caramont,” in the same street, belonging to the ci-
devant comte of that name, though not an “hôtel garni,” is let in
apartments, the greater part of which were occupied first by Mr.
Jackson, and afterwards by Mr. Merry. The rooms are delightful; but
it rarely happens, that any are vacant. I forgot to mention, that there
is also in this street a small hotel, called, “l’Hôtel de Jura,” which is
well furnished, and has a pretty garden.
The houses, which I have enumerated, are those which are the
most known, the best situate, and the most esteemed. Beside these,
there are “l’Hôtel de Vauban,” “l’Hôtel de Congrès,” and “l’Hôtel de la
Grand Bretagne,” all situate in “la rue St. Honoré,” and said to be
respectable houses. For those also who do not object to be
surrounded with bustle and noise, “l’Hôtel de la Chancellerie,” near
the “Palais Royal,” will offer good accommodations. I am told, the
apartments there are uncommonly elegant, and extremely
spacious[90].
To this account I must add a negative recommendation of la rue
Traversière, in which there are several hotels, and into which the
windows of some in la rue de la Loi also look. A perpetual market,
with all the attendant smells, renders the houses in “la rue
Traversière” extremely unpleasant; and the same reason obstructs
the passage, so that it is difficult, in a carriage, to find one’s way to
any door in this street. The caution is the more necessary, as
postboys frequently recommend the situation.
There is some objection to almost every hotel; I cannot, therefore,
recommend any one; but, were I to visit Paris again, I think I should
either try “l’Hôtel de Courlande, place Louis XV,” the situation of
which is incomparable; “l’Hôtel de Grange Batelière,” which, in
accommodations and size, is superior to any house of the same
kind; or “l’Hôtel des Étrangers, rue Vivienne,” which is universally
well spoken of by those who have inhabited it.
As to the “traiteurs,” or persons who supply you with dinners, they
sometimes belong to the house where you lodge, and sometimes
not.
I tried several during my stay at Paris, and I found them all so bad,
and so uncertain, that, were I to return, I would either hire a cook, or
dine constantly at the house of a “restaurateur[91].” The most
celebrated are, Naudit, and Robert, in the Palais Royal, Beauvillier in
the rue de la Loi, and Verry in the garden of the Thuilleries. Besides
the public room, which is always elegantly ornamented, there is, at
each of these places, several small rooms, or cabinets, for private
parties. A long bill of fare, called “la carte,” consisting of all the
delicacies of the season, and every variety of wine, with the prices
affixed to each article, is handed to you, and the dishes are no
sooner named, than they are instantly served. The apartments are
tastefully decorated, the linen and plate are particularly clean, and
the waiters civil, attentive, and well dressed. The cooking is
incomparable. Ladies, as well as gentlemen, dine at these houses,
and even in the public room several of the former are always
present. On a rough calculation, the expense of dining at one of the
first restaurateurs, including a fair quantity of the best wine, varies
from twelve livres (ten shillings) to a louis each person.
There are, however, inferiour houses of this kind, where, even for
trent-six sols (or eighteen pence english) a dinner of several dishes,